[Reading time: 2 minutes 11 seconds]
One of my aerospace engineering professors said that “engineering is the art of cheating, and getting away with it”.
He’s… not wrong. It’s still dangerous advice though. Because barely getting away with things goes well, until it doesn’t.
And then your shiny new 737MAXes fall out of the sky.
The 737MAX is such a fascinating example of how choices in engineering often don’t lead to disasters in blatant, obvious ways, despite the disasters themselves being very, well, blatant and obvious.
There would have been numerous ways of avoiding that particular disaster: Just to pick a few that come to mind: Boeing could have
- not used MCAS in the first place
- designed the MAX aerodynamically differently
- mandated simulator training
- tested MCAS error conditions better
- not tried to get yet another modernisation out of the long-in-the-tooth 737 airframe
And all of these options were probably discussed at one point or another.
What all of these suggestions have in common: they would have meant cutting less corners, and consequently costing more money, or time, or customer goodwill.
They got away with all of these things, until all of a sudden they didn’t and were engulfed in this seemingly surprising eruption of trouble.
This is how it usually is with corner-cutting. There’s a well-known term for this – the sum of all the things ought to have been done, the sum of all decisions that were great but aren’t anymore, the small sins everybody commits: technical debt.
And just like in the real world, debts must be paid back, with interest.
Perhaps less well known are the analogous concepts of cultural debt and process debt. Again, the sum of things not being blatantly wrong, yet not how they should be; this time, in the areas of process and organisational culture.
Here’s a surprise for you: you never have to battle just one.
If you have considerable debt of one kind, this points to the other two being present as well.
And consequently, attacking only one kind of debt will not offer lasting relief.
This is what’s so hard about building great product delivery organisations: you need to get all aspects right, consider all links of the chain. And that’s why having multiple feedback loops is such a powerful and important tool – so you have a chance to spot debt building up before it becomes crippling.